YAXHA, Guatemala — More than 1,500 years ago, Maya priest-kings built dozens of pyramids just tall enough to poke above the suffocating jungle here and reach the cooling breezes of a nearby lake.
They also carved dozens of stone monuments, erected handball courts and laid out the streets of their city in a grid, a departure from the sprawling confusion of most other contemporaneous Maya cities.
It was supposedly the third-largest city in the Maya empire, a bustling trade and ceremonial hub 20 miles from Tikal, one of the greatest centers of Maya culture.
What a difference a millennium makes.
Today, Yaxha is an obscure cluster of oddly shaped hills covered with vines and towering trees. Troops of howler monkeys scramble through the treetops, fighting for space near the lake. The only sign that it was once a great center is a single weathered gray pyramid.
Like hundreds of other Maya cities, Yaxha remains largely unrestored and neglected, moldering away in the vicious heat and soaking rains of Guatemala's vast northern territory called the Peten.
It is difficult to imagine a newly discovered pyramid in Egypt sitting untouched and unexplored. Yet that is what happens with thousands of Maya sites throughout Central America.
"We simply do not have the resources to investigate them all," said Luis Fernando Paniaqua, head of the government's Department for the Registration of Cultural Property, which tracks Maya artifacts.
There is sporadic exploration, mostly on the part of joint Guatemalan and foreign teams. A German team works in Yaxha. Farther north, researchers from UCLA join with Guatemalan archeologists at El Mirador, a site near the Mexican border far more remote than Yaxha. (The Maya empire sprawled from modern-day Mexico into Honduras.)
Still, many more sites remain untouched. In the far northwestern corner of Guatemala, there is a cluster of Maya sites that have been discovered but remain unexplored.
Paniaqua said he believes that the sites have been visited repeatedly by grave robbers from the Mexican side of the border and that there is little the Guatemalan government can do about it.
"It's an economic problem," he said. "These sites are deep in the jungle. There's no infrastructure. It's difficult to put any guards out there."
By some estimates, there are more than 2,000 Maya sites in Guatemala alone, of which only one in 20 is guarded.
